Although there are many content management systems, Joomla has demonstrated that it is here to stay as one of the worlds most popular CMSs. While WordPress and Drupal are worhy competitors each with they own unique strengths, Joomla provides the middle ground doing most things well.

Another strong point is the Open Source nature of Joomla. Original roots are found in Mambo, however issues over commercial versus open source resulted in most of the core development team leaving to form Joomla. The community that has sprung up around Joomla is amazing in both its diversity and breadth. The colaborative nature of the open source model means that there are litterally people from all over the world working toward a common goal, making Joomla better. Apart from the core CMS there are hundreds of other individuals and groups working to offers addons that offer specific functionality not included in the core system. Some of these are open source and freely available to all, while others may require purchase or registration, often at negligable cost.

I love using Joomla because it allows the end user to get involved in maintaining their own site. For most it is hardly more difficult than using an online mail system. (To be sure there are some things that are way more complicated, but for basic text and pictures it is easy).

Hosting is the place where your website lives, and there are literally thousands of companies providing a service. Choosing which one will work for you often depends on what you are trying to achieve and the compromises that you are willing to make.

In variably the least expensive options are hosted on servers along with hundreds or thousands of other sites, and while you may be promised huge storage and bandwidth, by the time you have hundreds of  surfers hitting the same server's other sites things can grind to a halt. One upside might be that if the server is on the other side of the planet then peak load times may be opposite and so the impact may be less.

At other end of the cost scale is a MS Windows based server in an Australian data centre. Locating in Oz has a speed/response advantage and also web search bots may rank your site higher as it is located in the same geographic area as your intended audience, although with the huge number of Aussie sites hosted outside of the country and the gobal nature of the internet, other factors may have a far greater impact on your web rankings.

For most the middle ground involves hosting on a fair priced US server with a NIX based operating system.

Other things to consider:-

1. Do you have access to the control panel?
2. How many email accounts can you have?
3. Does you site need a database?
4. If a domain name is included, can you move to another host later if this one doesn't work out?
5. Is e-commerce supported?
6. Does the server support the necessary versions for running your particular website.